How To Best Use Your Tablet - 5 Innovative Tips For Salespeople

It’s Innovation Day today and to celebrate we’ve rounded up five ways salespeople are using iPads and other mobile devices to up their sales game.

Let’s dive right in with 5 innovative tips for salespeople to make the most of their hardware.

1. In Kiosk mode at an exhibition

Did you read our blog on how tomake the most of exhibitions and attract people to your stand? One of our suggestions was to make your exhibition stand a comfy, relaxing place for your customers to hang out, and to leave iPads in Kiosk mode so that exhibition attendees can browse your offering without feeling pressured. Another idea is to use the tablet’s many opportunities for fun and set up a game that everyone can get involved in – a sure-fire hit at exhibitions. As well as offering entertainment, this also gives people a reason to keep coming back to your stand – either to improve their score or to see how they’re faring on the leader board. One website even suggests aniPad Jeopardy Wallmade up of dozens of iPads pre-programmed with your questions to encourage learning and fun – worth a try!

2. Collaborating with customers to define customized offerings

How many times have you, as a customer, reached the point of a sale where you sit with a salesperson to define exactly what it is you want to buy? Maybe it’s a kitchen, or a car, or a sofa. This is the part where they try and upsell you insurance or additional features or a lifetime guarantee, but generally speaking you find yourself stuck on one side of a desk and them on the other, with a great big clunky desktop or laptop between you. You can’t see all the buttons they’re pressing, and you begin to have misgivings about the huge investment you’re about to make.

From a sales perspective, this is the point where you’re in danger of losing ground. Having established a friendly rapport during your pitch, putting a desk or computer between you undoes a lot of that hard work. Using a tablet, sitting side by side and working out the details together makes this a much more collaborative process and continues that easy dialogue you’ve already established. The bottom line? Ditch the desk – it’s blocking your sales mojo.

3. For the walk and talk

Sometimes your customer only has a few minutes. Sometimes you bump into them unexpectedly and need to make the most of a literal elevator pitch. For either occasion, a laptop just isn’t going to cut it. Aside from the time it takes to fire up a laptop, it’s an awkward thing to use when you’re standing up.

If you’re trying to make the most of astand-up sales meeting, you need a tablet. Tablets start up instantly, they are light and ultra portable, they’re easy to pass between you, and to use one-handed. Plus, the chances are you’ll be carrying your iPad with you everywhere, which isn’t necessarily true of a laptop.

If you have a tablet, the chances are you’re already using it to call home when you’re traveling. You can use that same technology to make work calls, and you’re not limited to 1-2-1 calling either. It’s possible to have group chats of 20+ people on your tablet and with theright app for your deviceyou can share your screen and conduct all aspects of a business meeting on the go. Plus you can take advantage of the flexible nature of a tablet to find the light and look your best! No more Blair Witch Project style up-nostril camera angles.

5. To deliver presentations

There are myriad ways you can use your tablet to give a great presentation. If it’s one-to-one, you get the aforementioned benefit of sitting side by side with your customer. If you are meeting with 2 or more people, you can either give your audience tablets of their own and share your screen, or else connect your tablet with a larger screen and deliver your presentation in the traditional way, but with the advantage of having complete control of your slide deck via your tablet. We find this a million times easier than using a remote, because it gives you the flexibility to step outside your slide deck and introduce new collateral if called for, allowing you to go with the flow of the sales conversation – or respond quickly to questions from the audience – rather than being limited to just one resource. In addition, you can keep an eye on your presentation notes on the iPad while the big screen is displaying your slide deck, so no need for flashcards, or to stay glued to a plinth – your notes will stay with you.

‘Tablets are for Netflix. PCs are for spreadsheets’

I love this quote fromBuzzBoardbecause it perfectly sums up why tablets are better sales tools than laptops: they’re more fun. We’re in a new sales age, wherecustomer relationships are more important than everand people are looking as much for an experience as they are for a service. Tablets deliver on this in a way that laptops never could. They empower conversations and build rapport, where laptops put up a wall. Even almost 8 years on from the launch of the first iPad, they still have a cool factor that no laptop has, and that reflects on your brand identity.

Want to continue the sales innovation celebrations? Why not join us at the Sales Innovation Expo on 21st and 22nd March at the ExCel in London? We’ll be exhibiting at booth number 1810 and you can bet we’ll be bringing our tablets along!

Do you have or are you thinking about bringing in tablets for your salespeople? We’d love to talk you through how a Sales Enablement tool can help you make the most of both your marketing content and your hardware.